Westchester High improves in attendance, test scores after conversion to science magnet

Long plagued by racial issues and declining enrollment, Westchester High School was heading for a cliff two years ago when a young, ambitious principal was tapped to craft a plan that amounted to a Hail Mary.

Bobby Canosa-Carr's idea to convert the school into a full science magnet drew fierce criticism from some neighbors and parents, who feared his vision would close the door to locals and compromise the school's diversity.

One year into the school's new incarnation, Carr appears to have stopped the death spiral. But some critics are far from sold, and some neighborhood parents are still feeling disenfranchised.

Enrollment - which had plunged to 1,280 from a peak of 3,000 - has bumped back up to nearly 1,450. Passage rates of the high school exit exam have risen. Perhaps most significantly, the school's attendance rate has gone from one of the worst among the 100 high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District to No. 1.

"There's a completely different feeling in the air," Carr said, adding that the school's test scores showed marked improvement, according to data released Friday by the state.

Located in an affluent, mostly white neighborhood, Westchester High was a guinea pig of the desegregation experiments of the early 1970s. To break up racial homogeneity, LAUSD began busing black students from Crenshaw High School to the school. The white population reacted by leaving in droves.

The school has tried to re-create itself several times over the years to reverse the slide. But nothing seemed to take, and the 35-year-old Carr said that by the time he stepped up to the plate, there were whisperings about the possibility of closing the sprawling campus and selling the prime real estate to the highest bidder.

One of Carr's superiors even told him he could very well be Westchester High's last principal.

Now officially known as the Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets, the school takes a hands-on approach to preparing kids for white-collar professions. It consists of three separate tracks, which are officially separate magnet schools: aviation and aerospace; environmental science; and health and sports medicine.

As a result of the reconfiguration, the school replaced 40 percent of its teachers. Much of the new faculty consists of professionals who have worked in the given field of study. For instance, the school's athletic-training teacher in the health-and-sports-medicine magnet also works as the head trainer for the Los Angeles Sparks, a WNBA team.

Meanwhile, the critics' biggest fears have not come to pass. Rather than closing the door to locals, the school guarantees space for families in the neighborhood. (Area students also now have the option to attend Venice High School.)

Carr says about half of the students hail from the school's attendance area - a proportion that has remained unchanged from prior years.

And despite rumblings that the plan was just a back-door way to dilute the school's black majority population, the share of the school's students who are black remains unchanged at 70 percent - the highest in all of LAUSD, according to Carr.

But some of the most vocal critics remain unconvinced. Among them is Kelly Kane, president of the Westchester/Playa Vista Education Foundation.

Kane believes the move to create three magnet schools alienated the Westchester community, and to little benefit.

"I think nothing has changed," she said. "I think it's the same teachers, the same students and the same issues. All of this turmoil and upheaval for nothing."

Kane said the change precludes her from raising money for the school, adding that the foundation previously generated a total of about $1.5 million for Westchester High over an eight-year window.

But social studies teacher Kenneth Tiegs said some lingering criticism is to be expected.

"The critics are always going to be critics," he said, adding that he's glad that an effort to derail the magnet conversion by turning Westchester High into a charter school failed. "Anybody who wants a charter - they're still going to want a charter. That will never be me and you can quote me on that."

Added Carr: "A couple of the critics who wanted to convert this school to a charter just enrolled their kids in the school. ... The people saying this was going to be a disaster - their kids go here."

Kane is not among them; her children are still in elementary and middle school. But Lisa Hamor is, and her feelings about the conversion are mixed.

On the one hand, Hamor, a 1981 graduate of the school, appreciates the heightened focus on academics.

"But I feel they have disenfranchised the community in many ways," she said.

For instance, Hamor said many locals aren't thrilled about the school uniform policy requiring students to wear red Polo shirts.

"I'm all for enforcement of the dress code - no more holy jeans and underwear sticking out," he said.

Hamor added that her daughter was also pulled out of a leadership class to fulfill a requirement that she take two science courses.

"They took her out without calling me - without engaging me," she said.

The skeptics last year also included students, such as Nick Davis, a varsity basketball player and the student body vice president.

"The school had changed a few times before this, and I really didn't have a lot of faith in the school," said the senior from Ladera Heights. "I just wanted to take my classes and get out."

But Davis said he's detected a change in the attitude of his fellow students. "They are going in (to class) curious. We've got new teachers who are young and have energy."

The magnet conversion isn't the school's first attempt at reform. The most recent one, embarked on in 2008, involved a deep partnership with Loyola Marymount University. That partnership still exists - LMU provides tutors and opportunities for high school students to land internships.

But the agreement used to give LMU a certain amount of authority over the high school's principal. That part has been scrapped, Carr said.

The new configuration also has a trailblazing aspect. Traditionally, magnet schools are not allowed to prioritize area residents, but the district made an exception for the Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets, in part because attracting neighborhood students back to the campus would help restore racial balance, Carr said. Making an exception required that the district create a new category of magnet, called a residential magnet.

Regarding the three actual magnet programs, aviation and aerospace is the only one among them to have minimum academic requirements for entry, as it is a Gifted and Talented Education program. (It is also the only one that already existed in some form before the transformation.) Students in the program learn to fix airplanes, and take field trips to Los Angeles International Airport, where they shadow professionals of all stripes. A flight-simulation program is on its way.

Students in environmental science take a course that could be thought of as the wood shop of the 21st and 22nd centuries. Under the direction of teacher Joe Sparks - a former general contractor who specialized in sustainable structures - they construct a miniature house in a way that is energy neutral, and then tear it down at the end of the class.

The health-and-sports-medicine magnet is a fitting program for a school long celebrated for its athletics: Westchester High has won six state basketball championships in 15 years.

"If they just go to college and play in college and after their four years of eligibility is up they have no skills, it was all a waste," Carr said. "Our idea is take their interest in athletics and connect it to the human body - we find that athletes are passionate about how the human body works."

Of course, Carr has good reason to be gung-ho about the new configuration: it's his baby. Tiegs' assessment of where they're at is more measured.

"Student buy-in, parent buy-in - all those things were a challenge last year," he said. "We're making huge progress. We're not where we're going to be. But you come back in five years, and you're going to be like `wow.' Maybe even three years."